Herman Cain Exits

“Now here’s why it hurts,” Herman Cain said, at what was meant to be an event celebrating the opening of an office in Atlanta, and instead became one in which he announced he was “suspending” his campaign “after a lot of prayer and soul searching.” His source of pain, he said, was that the “false and unproven accusations” about him—multiple accounts of sexual harassment as well as one of a long affair—were “untrue,” but had been “spinned by media and the court of public opinion” into a “cloud of doubt.” He added, “That spin hurts, it hurts my wife, it hurts my family, it hurts me, and it hurts the American people because you are being denied solutions.” Really, we promise—we’ll manage. Cain suspending his campaign means that we will no longer have to suspend our disbelief about the seriousness of his candidacy, or about what’s become of our political culture.

But maybe, or unfortunately, we won’t have to say goodbye. “I am not going to be silenced, and I am not going away,” Cain said. “Becoming President was Plan A. And before you get discouraged, I want to describe Plan B.” He then proceeded to discourage anyone who hoped for a coherent description of Plan B:

Or maybe this is Plan B: “I am going to be making an endorsement in the near future.” He went so far as to say that the person he would be endorsing would not be Barack Obama, which is unlikely to be discouraging news for the President. Does that mean we will be subjected, in the next few days, to the sight of Romney and Gingrich courting him, perhaps at the debate that will be moderated by Donald Trump. (There really is one, though not every candidate has signed on.)

That prospect—declarations of love for Herman, his ordinary genius, his steadfast wife, his pizza—strikes one as an even less pleasant than the candidates yelling at each other. And Cain may have more to offer than his name; “suspending” means that the campaign still exists as a fundraising entity, though in a more limited sense. During the length of his campaign, Cain said, “America has learned something about this process of running for President. It’s a dirty game. It’s a dirty, dirty game”—one in which he might still have a few interesting moves. America has also learned how divided the Republican Party is, and how very strange a primary season can be. (Maybe it’s not just Republicans: Kelefa Sanneh argues that something has changed in our political culture, and the Democrats may be in for a similar spectacle the next time around.) Cain’s departure is thought to be good for Gingrich, because he is now the leading candidate who is not Romney. But given Gingrich’s flaws, it may just leave more room for another unlikely minor character to break out and dance across the stage. Santorum, Huntsman, Perry, Bachmann, even Paul—was any one of them fundamentally less likely than Cain? Never mind Plan B; does the G.O.P. have a Plan C, D, or E?

Cain didn’t miss any opportunities, in all this, to put blame on the press. Before reciting some fairly generic lines of inspiration, he said, “I believe these words came from the Pokemon movie; the media pointed that out.” (He has attributed them, in the past, to a “poet,” though they have also been associated with Donna Summer.) He added that, “Even if the political elites don’t think I handle it the way the political elites handle it, I handled it my way.” His media-management ways included, among other things, hiring a spokesman, J.D. Gordon, fresh from, of all places, Guantánamo Bay. In retrospect, that should have been a sign—a bad one: Gordon didn’t do a very good job of justifying the unjustifiable at Guantanamo, either. Maybe no one could. But the prison is still open, doing its damage to America, and the Cain campaign, finally, is over. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” Cain said. Don’t mention it.

Amy Davidson Sorkin is a New Yorker staff writer. She is a regular Comment contributor for the magazine and writes a Web column, in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.